Another attempt to find paradise

The week before I moved to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, People Magazine ran an article on how neo-Nazis who lived in a compound a few miles from town had terrorized a local black family.

“Are you out of your mind?” the friend who showed me the article asked. “You cannot move there.” We were living in Berkeley at the time, barely hanging on. I hadn’t realized I’d need to be rich to live in such a groovy bastion of free thought.

Maybe I wouldn’t have moved to Idaho then except that, after only a month in Berkeley, I knew I didn’t really belong there. I had only part-time work cleaning houses of rich people and taking care of their children. It was hot and the air smelled bad from all the cars and trucks on the streets—it was not the paradise I had imagined it would be. I lived in an apartment over a garage. From my window, everything I saw was concrete.

Idaho, on the other hand, when I saw it at its peak in July, was clean and beautiful, and everything was cheap. I hadn’t seen Nazis but athletic people who swam in the crisp, clear water of Lake Coeur d’Alene and hiked the local hills and mountains. Everyday was around 70 degrees and the light lasted until 10 p.m. People occupied themselves with being outdoors, any way and anytime possible—everything else was secondary.

In Berkeley, the need to make money had become intensely clear since I couldn’t afford to eat out or go anywhere. I lived with the sickening realization that some unknown career was looming over my head, and decisions on graduate schools and graduate degrees would soon need to be made.

It’s no wonder, then, that I chose to go swim in Coeur d’Alene instead, to put off such finalities for at least another year or two as I biked its streets, going nowhere really.

-- Beth Blevins

Never move to a place you've only seen on vacation

Never move to a place you’ve only seen on vacation. I should have learned that lesson from moving to Idaho after spending a brief summer vacation there. (Beautiful in July, by mid-September it had begun to frost at night and snow was soon to follow—and then the isolation of being in a place where I knew almost no one).



I fell in love with Washington after a graduate school field trip. We went to the usual landmarks, then spent evenings in ethnic restaurants in Georgetown. I felt so sophisticated, not bound to the limited fare and same old, restricted routes I’d left behind in North Carolina. I could see myself living in a cute Brownstone with a turret, visiting museums on the weekend, dining in good restaurants after work, walking all over the city.



When I came back for a job interview that summer, I should have taken as omen a discussion I had with the woman who interviewed me. The office was only three blocks from the National Gallery of Art, so when I remarked that she must go to the museum a lot, she said she hadn’t been in months, she’d been too busy.



Flash forward to the reality of my life in D.C. a few months later: in an seventh-floor apartment with no balcony, in a place where I didn’t feel safe walking out of at night by myself, even to my car, since people were frequently mugged. I was awakened one night to hear a nightclub crowd surging toward the street. Someone had been shot in the park in front of our apartment, and they all wanted to see the body. Another night/early morning, someone was getting beaten up on the trunk of a car by two men and when I called 9-1-1, the operator didn’t seem to believe that our street existed; over and over again I tried to give her directions. A police car arrived more than 30 minutes later, after all the men had disappeared. (All this in a fairly nice part of D.C.—but, of course, it wasn’t Georgetown. That turned out to be far too expensive for someone on a librarian’s salary. I hadn't understood how much things could cost in a city.)



And I was inside an office building in Crystal City, Virginia all day, not out in the air until it was almost dark, working with people who mostly had no personalities. They worked, they shopped, they went home and tended their houses and got ready to go to work again. That was about the extent of their lives, for the most part, except for maybe church activities or small efforts at crafts and volunteering.



On the day we moved out of D.C., we were caught in a drug bust on the street. Police cars came from all directions and surrounded the people like prey. Guns were drawn. No one seemed very surprised by any of it, not even the people who were being arrested. It seemed the appropriate send-off.

-- Beth Blevins